Fishing Vacation - volume one

This blog has been dead for awhile. I have been posting on the WI Women Fish facebook page instead and decided to go back to the blog thing. I often intend on writing stories of our fishing outings and such but always seem to be waiting till I have enough time. Well is there ever enough time? So I am breaking up with facebook for awhile and logging stuff on here just to see how things go. This first one will be about our fishing vacation. Instead of my daily facebook posts I will post it on here.

The ice left Wisconsin early and we planned to go on a fishing vacation. It was a tough choice to leave the spring walleye run that was just heating, up as well as the steelhead fishing that I was hoping to do. My fishing partner Holly, had told me many fishing tails about huge trout in the White River of Arkansas. Another fishing pal of mine, Rich, moved to the far south and we had often spoke of surf fishing in the salt water. We combined these two ideas and added in an overdue visit with some friends of mine who live on a lake just south of Atlanta GA. Their place has a special memory for me as on my last visit there I lost a pole off their dock to a giant cat fish. It is helpless feeling to see your pole shoot off the end of a dock like a boat had snagged the line. One splash later and it was gone for good. So off we begin on the fishing trifecta. First stop Jackson Lake GA.

I left the UP of Michigan to drop my cat off in Northern WI. Two hours into the trip I hit a deer with my truck. It came out of nowhere. I will spare you the gross details but it was not pretty and I now have a dent in the front of my pretty truck. The headlights and all the important stuff are still in tact so the trip will not be delayed. Any other time Holly would have harvested some of the venison but due to the time crunch we had to leave if for the wolves.

We left WI the day before good Friday. Holly had to work so we didn't get on the road until after 5 p.m. My truck was packed to the max and Roxy and Keeper ( dogs) were in the back seat settled in for the trip. We stopped at a wayside in IL. By the way IL seems like the longest state in the universe to drive thru. Anyway we stopped at this way side somewhere along I -39. We took a short hike on some trails that we mowed at the travel stop. We came across a bird house that ended up being a geocache site. Inside the bird house was a few trinkets people had left and also a prized find of Flossy the Toothfairy a Travel Bug Dog Tag. Basically its a cute plastic fairy about 6 inches tall who wants you to take her on adventures, log the travels on the internet and eventially leave her at another geo cache site to be picked up by another person. Well you would think I would have won the lottery as this was really exciting for me. I have never geocached before because frankly I hate looking for stuff. I have however, came across several of them in the past just by accident. So this was a big treat and we scooped "Flossy" up and she is our official mascot of the trip. We hope to get pictures of her along the way and make sure she has some fun. ( The possibilities are endless) Anyway if you want to check out the site its www.groundspeak.com and Flossy's dog tag number is 477866.

So anyway the trip continued and we made it to GA last last night, Good Friday. It took us 4 hours to get thru Atlanta to Jackson GA, which is usually a 1 hour drive. It appeared there was a national emergency and everyone in the city of Atlanta was asked to leave and drive south on I75 exactly at the same time we were driving through. At least it seemed that way. I guess that is "normal" holiday weekend traffic. I guess I would rather have to watch out for deer that have to deal with that. It kinda made me cross.

So this morning I am sitting on the deck over looking the water and watching fishing boats come in front to fish my friends pier. The water is a little finger off the main lake and anglers often fish in the little cove right in front of my friends house. My host, Trudy, told me boats were out here yesterday and one man had 10 fish on a stringer. Dang, I wish they were the catch and release type. So its time to quit blogging and go fishing. I love vacation. Barb